Great article about the "obesity epidemic"

[firecat]

And not only because it uses my favorite example of confusing correlation with causation:

Killing Turkeys Causes Winter by Sandy Szwarc

(Those of you participating in the current LJ fat flame war, feel free to use this as ammo.)

Comments

Re: premise

[firecat]

I'll grant you the premise, but you need to look back farther than the 1970s to determine if your theory is correct. The article says this:

As Richard Klein chronicled in his book, Eat Fat (Vintage Books, 1996), fatness is often a cultural trend with cycles of fat and thin occurring throughout history. Typically people get fatter -- and healthier -- during times of prosperity. [...] In the past century people in industrialized nations have grown taller by about 4 inches on average. In Holland, in just four generations the average height for men grew 8 inches. (Burns, 1998; DeGregori, 2003)

If weights have been increasing for the last 120 years, and if people in other countries have been getting bigger as well, then the US government's farming subsidies in the 1970s can't account for the increase. They might be a contributing factor, but I think there are lots of other contributing factors.

The article also says this:

Increasing body weights during the 1990s, while statistically resulting in a national 61% increase in obesity, haven't been a health crisis for individuals whose weights have actually increased on average a mere 7 to 10 pounds, according to research by Jeffrey M. Friedman, M.D., Ph.D., at Rockefeller University.

Note that the statistical increase in obesity resulted partly from the government's changing the definition of obesity one or more times during the 1990s.

premise

[tedesson.livejournal.com]

This:

http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/72/5/1074/T2

has a description of the ways in which obesity has been defined since 1942. In my reply to sistercoyote, I posted evidence of a trend which uses a consistent definition, and indicates that a higher proportion of US adults have bme>30 now, than they did 30 years ago.